Elon Musk says OpenAI, Perplexity are not xAI's competition, 'The toughest competitors will be...'

Elon Musk believes his artificial intelligence start-up xAI will quickly leapfrog most competitors — with one exception. In a post on X, Musk said his company will “soon be far beyond any company besides Google, then significantly exceed Google.” But the Tesla and SpaceX chief suggested the real challenge won’t come from Silicon Valley, but from across the Pacific.

“Companies in China will be the toughest competitors,” Musk wrote, arguing that the country’s advantages in electricity and hardware manufacturing make it uniquely positioned to dominate AI.

It’s a telling statement. For months, Musk has been pitching xAI as a rival to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind. The company, which recently rolled out its Grok chatbot, has framed itself as building safer, more transparent AI systems. But his latest comments point to a geopolitical edge in the race — one defined less by talent or algorithms and more by sheer infrastructure.

China already produces the world’s largest share of solar panels and batteries, and has far greater energy capacity than the US Its companies are also world leaders in hardware manufacturing, from semiconductors to server racks. For AI, which demands both abundant electricity and specialised chips, that scale matters.